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Esther McCoy | 4

because the meeings were held in the Lescaze living room. But Schindler wasn't that easy. I had heard stories that he was "only playing with architecture". An architect friend said, "But surely you don't believe that he takes it seriously!"
Then one day Pauline told me that Schindler's only draftsman had been called into the armed service. She suggested that I apply. I had seen him only once. He was standing by his parked car kicking a tire. His thick hair stood out from his head in a wiry wreath (he always cut it himself), and his heavy torso was covered with a silk shirt with a V neck and no cuffs (he designed his shirts himself), and clipped to the V was a pencil. He was dusty and tired. I remembered as I looked at him that one of the reason he "was not serious about architecture" was that he did his own contracting. ("How could someone serious about architecture spend every afternoon at the job sites?")
I took some courage to go to ask for a job. I selected from among a dozen or so engineering drawings the two most precisely drawn, then I cleaned up the drawings of the house and rolled them. I dressed in something that made me look serious and dependable. What did I expect? A cool dismissal. My wildest hope was to be in the office long enough to study a set of drawings of the Kings Road house.
At eleven one morning I went along the row of wild eugenias to his door, a heavy redwood swinging door with a small glazed peephole in which wa a sigh reading "By appointment only."